Part Two
It finally happened. Howard had gone completely crazy.
The unyielding hours of work, the constant broken
promises made to Jamie, and – to top it all off – the strenuous hunt for that
Turbo Man doll. It all finally brought him to his breaking point, and the
talking cowboy and spaceman dolls were proof of it. He hadn’t even realized
they were still complaining, after he dropped them to the floor in his state of
shock.
“And this is
why we hardly ever wake up for grown-ups,” the cowboy griped.
“Woody, remember what Santa told us,” the spaceman said.
“The only way they’ll know where to take us is if we revealed to them that
we’re alive.”
Kevin joined Howard in his astonishment over the living
toys. “This is too weird, even for me!”
Shyla, however, couldn’t have been more overjoyed.
“They’re so cute,” she gushed before turning to Kimbyr and asking, “Can we keep
them?”
“No, honey,” Kimbyr denied. “We have to follow in our
mission to return them.”
“Back to Andy,” Woody confirmed. “I still can’t figure
how we ended up in the North Pole of all places.” He turned to his
intergalactic compatriot and consulted, “You recall any of it, Buzz?”
Buzz was too preoccupied with ogling the console room of
Kimbyr’s TARDIS, which was even more massive in capacity from the perspective
of a toy spaceman. “Wow,” he uttered, following a long amused whistle. “This
place is amazing!” He looked up
towards Kimbyr and asked, “Is this your
spacecraft?”
Kimbyr nodded with a smile. “It is. It’s called a
‘TARDIS’ – short for ‘Time And Relative Dimensions In Space’. Emphasis on
‘dimensions’.” She proceeded to scan Woody and Buzz with her sonic screwdriver,
a device that alarmed the toys.
“Wa-Wha-What’re you doing?!” Woody exclaimed. “Are you
probing us?!”
Kimbyr snickered. “No, not at all. I’m just taking a
sample of your nuage signature to input into the TARDIS, so that it can
pinpoint your home dimension.” She demonstrated this by inserting the sonic
through an open socket on the control console.
“Energy signature manipulation – brilliant!” Buzz praised
of the idea.
Woody felt like he made a wrong turn into a nerd
convention. Kimbyr was practically resurging Buzz’s space ranger delusions with
all her techno mumbo jumbo. But, as long as it helped get them back to Andy, he
allowed it.
Shortly after connecting the sonic with the TARDIS
mainframe, the passengers experienced strange turbulence within the infinite DC.
Kimbyr brought up the dimensional corridor itself on the viewscreen, seeing how
a weird snowstorm had frozen it entirely. “What the…?!” she gasped before
instinctively pulling a lever that forced her TARDIS into an emergency
dematerialization.
It reemerged in the middle of a snow-covered forest. The
travelers stepped out into a temperature that was well below zero degrees,
forcing them to retreat back inside the TARDIS.
“This is not
where we’re supposed to be,” Kimbyr gathered.
“Clearly,” Woody pessimistically said. “It was the middle
of summer when we disappeared from Andy’s house.”
Kimbyr began to bundle herself in a warm coat. “Howard,
do me a favor and look after Shyla, Kevin, and the toys while I’m gone,” she
instructed.
“Where are you going?” Howard asked.
“Out to investigate where we are, of course,” Kimbyr
remarked.
Needless to say, Howard was displeased at this. “And
you’re sticking me with the
babysitting?!”
“I won’t be gone for very long,” Kimbyr bolstered, though
it did nothing to quell Howard’s frustrations. He was already in deeper than he
wanted into this situation with a short, black-haired woman he met in a mall
and took him out of his depth of reality, leaving him to deal with children
(that weren’t even his) and living toys (neither of which were Turbo Man).
Shortly after Kimbyr’s departure, Shyla took advantage of
the free playtime she had with Woody and Buzz, now that their return home was
temporarily delayed. This left Kevin the only one standing with Howard in the
console room.
“Hey, kid,” Langston addressed the boy.
“The name’s Kevin.”
“Alright, Kevin.
Let me ask you something. How did a boy like you end up traveling across the
Twilight Zone? Isn’t your family worried about you?”
“My family doesn’t even know I disappeared. Wouldn’t be
the first time.”
“You ran away from home?”
“No. I didn’t
run away – not on purpose. I boarded the wrong flight out of Chicago and wound
up in New York where I met Kimbyr. She promised that she would return me to my
family.”
“And how long has that been now?”
Kevin hesitated to answer. Noting his hesitation, Howard
planted the seeds of doubt in the boy. “She doesn’t even intend on returning
you home, does she? She’s kidnapped you, just like she kidnapped me! How much do you know about this
woman – if we can call her that?”
“Shut up,” Kevin retorted. “You don’t know whatcha
talkin’ about.”
Howard watched the rebellious child
storm out of the console room, feeling guilty of himself for going so far in
his assumptions. Yet he had to assume the worst about this strange and possibly
dangerous situation he was trapped in.
-------------------
Ten minutes into her lone
expedition, Kimbyr’s legs already felt numb beneath her black yoga pants.
Wherever dimension her TARDIS brought them to, it was the coldest she had ever
been since that research station in 1982 Antarctica. Aw, man…I certainly hope that’s not where we are, she
dismally thought. I can’t risk losing a
hand again!
She was snapped out of her flashback as soon as she
stumbled on what appeared to have been a sleigh with eight reindeer connected
to it. The sight of it made her wonder if the TARDIS had brought them back to
the North Pole. But then she noticed a young brunette come into view, dressed
like Santa Claus.
“Second year as Santa and I’m way off-course from where I should be,” she mumbled to herself (or
presumably the reindeers).
“Uh, excuse me?” Kimbyr addressed the woman, who jumped
in fright from the sudden sound of her voice. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare ya.”
“N-No, it’s okay,” the brunette told her. “Where did you
come from?”
Kimbyr put on a timid smirk. “Ehh, that’s a long story.
I’m more concerned as to where I am now.”
“That’s what we’re
trying to figure out, too.”
Kimbyr looked on the brunette’s reindeer entourage and
back on the brunette afterwards, recognizing the familiar way in which she was
dressed. “Are you supposed to be…Santa Claus?” she asked her.
“I’m not ‘supposed’ to be,” the brunette said. “I am Santa Claus.”
“A girl Santa,” Kimbyr processed the notion for a brief moment.
“Very cool.”
The brunette was elated to hear her approval. She stuck
her red-gloved hand out to Kimbyr and formerly introduced herself: “My name’s
Noelle – my birth name, I mean.”
Kimbyr’s black-gloved hand met with Noelle’s. “I’m
Kimbyr.”
“Yeah, I know.”
This surprised Kimbyr. “Really? Have we met before?
‘Cause that sort of thing happens a lot
in my lives…er…life.”
“It’s one of my gifts as Santa,” Noelle explained. “I
just know every detail about someone just looking at them. Like I know you’ve
traveled from very, very far away and
taken it upon yourself and your friends to return two lost toys to a boy, on a
promise you’ve made to another Santa – Scott, I think his name is.”
Kimbyr was spellbound by how accurate she was in detail.
“You are Santa!”
Her attention on Noelle was soon diverted to a small
white reindeer that descended to their location of the forest. Noelle warmly
greeted the tiny creature just as it landed, “Snowcone! What did you find?”
Snowcone answered by bobbing his head towards a specific direction.
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